Environmental controls and anthropogenic impacts on deep-sea sponge grounds in the Faroe-Shetland Channel, NE Atlantic: the importance of considering spatial scale to distinguish drivers of change

Determining the scale of anthropogenic impacts is critical in order to understand ecosystem effects of human activities, within the context of changes caused by natural environmental variability. We applied spatial eigenfunction analysis to disentangle effects of anthropogenic drivers from environmental factors on species assembly in the Faroe-Shetland Channel (FSC), in the northeast Atlantic. We found that the species assembly considered here...